daron aric hagen

'I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me.’ — Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi.

David Diamond had given me the impression that student composers at Juilliard were forbidden to take lessons with anyone except our principle teacher; so, meeting with Vincent Persichetti felt sort of illicit, dangerous – especially because of the way he leaned forward over the desk that separated us on which the full score of my first symphony was spread. It was the spring of 1985, and near the end of what had been a delightfully instructive lesson. His piercing, bird-like eyes shone as spoke, his sentences came out in short, conspiratorial bursts; his cigarette smoldered, forgotten, between his fingers, the long, drooping ash hanging from the business end was on the verge of falling off.

‘Golly,’ he said, you’ve got a handsome hand there,’ Vincent said, paging through my score one last time. He got to the point. ‘Arnie tells me you won’t take his class.’

Arnold Arnstein, appreciated and respected with quiet ferocity by an entire generation of American composers, including Bernstein, Diamond, Harris, Schuman, Barber, Piston, Persichetti, and Diamond, among others, was generally believed to be the finest living American music copyist. And he really was. Years of the work had destroyed his eyes, which were reamed in red and watery, hugely enlarged by the thick glasses he wore. He taught a class in music copying at Juilliard that all of us composers were required to take. I had been working already for five years as a professional copyist, and had some pretty heavy clients, including Diamond (a somewhat sadistic employer), Elliot Carter (whose wife Helen would telephone me very, very early in the morning to ask how the work was coming along), Ned (an excellent, patient employer who customarily paid other copyists more than me), and others, and so I had figured, with casual ignorance, that I should be exempted from attendance.

‘We’ve got to figure out some sort of way to work this out, Daron,’ said Vincent. ‘Arnie’s a great copyist, y’know; he could teach you a lot.’ He shot me a quick look. ‘But, but,’ he not so much stuttered as took quick gulps of air, ‘y’know, if you weren’t so talented, I’d say, uh, sure, y’know, go ahead, take these copying jobs. But, I think you’ve gotta not do that. Um, do anything, uh, be a garbage man; just stop copying other people’s music for them.’

‘But I need the money,’ I replied. The cigarette ash fell on my score, just as I had feared it would.

‘Yeah, I know. Oops,’ he said, brushing off the ash, ‘Sorry.’ A quick, sweet smile, ‘Plus, you get half the money up front and all that; then you have to work it off,’ he sighed, looked at the floor. ‘Well. Maybe I could ask Arnie to put you on his crew for this Menotti opera he’s copying right now. I hear it’s pretty wildly behind schedule and he needs extra guys. Then you could learn from him, y’see, and get paid at the same time, and not have to take his class. How about that?’

I remembered my first 'copying job' — extracting a piano solo part for the Yellow River Concerto in blue ballpoint pen for John David Anello and the Milwaukee Symphony during the seventies while I was still in high school. And then, my astonishment upon winning a job as a music copyist a few years later at the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music in Philadelphia when Sam Dennison, the curator, pulled from the shelves the same Yellow River part I had copied in Milwaukee. And then, working at Fleisher while a student at Curtis, spending hours in the stacks, combing through the collection of scores by South American composers copied by hard-working WPA chaps during the Depression — all exquisitely done, many in three or four colors, most never looked at again, let alone performed.

One of my work study jobs at the Curtis had been to copy parts for the school’s orchestra when necessary, to transfer bowings into them from the Philadelphia Orchestra string parts that Clint Newig – their coolly capable orchestra librarian – would send over. Another was to help Edwin Heilakka, the gentle, fascinating man who ran the Institute’s orchestra library, to organize Leopold Stokowski’s papers and scores – the maestro had just died and his widow had gifted them to the school. I remember opening some scores and having bread and butter letters from Aaron Copland, Bernard Herrmann, Samuel Barber, Ned, others slip out from where he had left them. My fingers practically tingled as I drew out of one of the boxes Stokowski’s full score of The Rite of Spring, which contained not just his clever orchestration changes in one color, but Stravinsky’s own modifications for performance specifically in the Academy of Music in another.

Twain: ‘Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!'

Computer software ‘engraving programs’ such as Score, Finale, and Sibelius have rendered mine the last generation of American concert music and opera composers who shall have had the opportunity to serve our musical apprenticeships in the ancient, traditional, and I think honorable manner of extracting, by hand, using quills, India ink, and vellum, the individual parts (which are all presented together in the conductor’s full score), from whence the musicians play the single lines the composer has crafted for them. We music copyists were like monks, running into one another at Associated Music just south of Columbus Circle when we stuck our heads out to pick up supplies, meet with our clients, share with our colleagues ‘secret saves’ and anecdotes from the trenches of our drawing boards.

I never took Arnie’s class, but I know that I should have. Despite Vincent’s advice I went on to serve as a copyist, proofreader, or editor on hundreds of projects over the next fifteen years. Sometimes I hear a piece of music on the radio I’ve never ‘heard’ before and realize that I copied the original set of parts for it during my salad days; it is even stranger to attend a rehearsal of one of my pieces and see yellowed, dog-eared, old rental library parts on the players’ stands next to mine for someone else’s piece that I don’t even remember having copied.

The money was pretty good, the work was always interesting; and there is absolutely no substitute for learning a piece by another composer from the inside out by extracting all the parts by hand. Every musician should do it once. It is possible to copy music mechanically, without really engaging intellectually – sort of like driving while having a conversation. Sometimes I did marathon jobs during which I would listen to every Mahler symphony in order, go back, and begin again. But, if one is really engaged during the process of copying another composer’s parts, one is actually ‘playing’ the composer’s process the way a pianist ‘plays’ a composer pianist’s piece – your brain and fingers are going through the same motions that the composer’s did when he wrote it. Several composers’ styles and methods grew so familiar to me during those years that I blush to admit that I could still probably compose something in their style that would be pretty hard to spot as a forgery.

Twain, again: ‘Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?’

My worst experience as a copyist was working for David Diamond: he had written a concerto for a soloist who, while in every other way professional, urbane, and musically sublime, hadn’t looked at his part very carefully before the first rehearsal; the conductor was frustrated by the fact that three or four errors had eluded my proofreader’s eye, but had only come to light piecemeal because not every player had attended every rehearsal. I recall the conductor spinning around and facing me from the podium at one point, shrieking, ‘Copyist! I thought you had corrected these parts!’ Everything turned out just fine. Correct them, I did: David had me change every one of the seventy or so printed parts by hand, using an electric eraser, over the course of the next few weeks to teach me, I suppose, a lesson. As far as I know, the piece hasn’t been performed since.

My loveliest experience as a copyist came one afternoon at the Fleisher Collection sometime in the early eighties: Karen Campbell, Kile Smith, Norman Stumpf, and I were all copying the parts to Louis Gruenberg’s enormous cantata Song of Faith, when I began softly humming the song ‘Another You.’ Norman picked up the tune, louder; Karen, who I could hear, but not see, began improvising on it an octave higher. Soon, the composer Romulus Franchescini joined in, and the saxophone-player copyist Bill (who actually preferred to be called Art but nobody knew that until twenty years after he retired) Daniels, and then Sam, growling in the bass, and finally, Kile, pattering a soft beat with a pen in one hand tapping a water glass and the other tapping his desk. After a little while, it died away naturally and we went back to work. It was such a moment of perfect grace that nobody ever mentioned it again.